Eye Sightings

The Consumer Eyes Blog

Category: Marketing & Retail

It’s a trend that has infiltrated every class of restaurant, from the dollar menu to the tasting menu. Call it what you will – small plates, shared plates, minis, tapas or the fourth meal – the snack sized portion has taken the country by storm.

The internet is abuzz with the news that Hasbro will be releasing new non-gender-specific colors of its Easy-Bake Oven. The move was apparently already underway at the toymaker when a 13-year-old girl in New Jersey created an online petition that garnered over 400,000 signatures and captured the attention of the blogosphere.

Watch out, Shapeways-- Staples has announced a new 3D printing service in the Netherlands and Belgium. It'll be using the innovative IRIS 3D printer, which eschews the usual extruded plastic material in favor of layered paper. This also allows the printer to add color as it prints, resulting in photorealistic imagery as well as three-dimensional structure.

So says the management at Taco Mac in Atlanta, who are hoping to repurpose Coca Cola’s successful Freestyle machines to also dispense booze along with their 120 sodas. If they have their way, expect to have the privilege of adding anything from rum or vodka, to tequila or Jack Daniels to your Cherry Coke-Sprite-Fanta concoction.

It was only a matter of time before companies started leveraging Pantone’s incredible Capsure technology, and it looks like Sephora will be the first to step up. They’ve just announced a game-changing skintone matching service using the sleek mini color spectrometer called Color IQ.

When was the last time you needed a church key to open a beer? Do you even remember the once-ubiquitous church key? Once upon a time, in the days before the pull tab or the pop top, beer was sold in flat-top cans that required a special triangle-pointed opener – we still use them sometimes for things like big cans of pineapple juice. And now one beer company, the appropriately-named Churchkey Can Co., is bringing back the classic design.

Former president and COO of McDonald’s, Mike Roberts, has a new venture in the works that might surprise you – a sustainable, grass-fed, butter-free, cream-free, white sugar-free, white flour-free, high-fructose corn syrup-free, GMO-free, trans fats-free, additives-free, and generally all-the-bad-stuff-for-you-free chain of restaurants, utilizing the much maligned but highly efficient McDonald’s style of supply chain management.